Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are widely used in a number of military and civilian applications including battlefield surveillance, environment/habitat monitoring, healthcare applications, home automation and traffic control. These WSNs are typically ad-hoc networks that include spatially distributed devices or nodes having transceivers and sensors to cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions and to communicate relevant information. The nodes are typically powered by an on-board battery supply so that they may be deployed in isolated locations and operate autonomously. To conserve battery energy and thereby permit long-term use, the nodes are typically duty-cycled whereby each node is turned on or off during selected time slots.
In ad-hoc communication networks including WSNs, each node may be willing to forward information from one node to a neighboring node thereby establishing one or more communication channels through the network. However, due to signal propagation delay between nodes and drifting clocks within each node, the time slots in neighboring nodes and across the network are not synchronized. This poses a communication problem because, when one node transmits information, another node that would otherwise be required to be turned on to receive the information might be off and unable to receive information or only receive portions of information.
Current techniques to solve this problem focus on synchronizing time clocks in each of the nodes in the network to a single global time. Most of these techniques involve an elaborate process of exchanging a series of messages between nodes that contain time stamped information generated in higher layers of the network protocol stack. A dominant source of error in such techniques is the variability between nodes in the time spent by the time-stamped messages in these higher layers. Furthermore, these techniques are energy inefficient in that they require numerous exchanges of timing information between nodes to synchronize their respective clocks, as well as the additional step of aligning the boundaries of the time slots based on the now synchronized clocks.
Accordingly there is a need for an alternative technique to synchronize nodes in communication networks such as WSNs.